When Deanna Strable, CEO of Principal Financial, mandated a four-hour, in-person artificial intelligence training session for her executive leadership team, the initial response wasn’t entirely enthusiastic.
“I had some resistance from my team,” recalls Strable, who says the training was held in July as part of a monthly meeting at the company’s corporate headquarters in Des Moines. “Some of them said, ‘Why do we need to do this?’”
But Strable felt it was critical that if Principal Financial were to get more of the company’s employees comfortable with regularly using AI, C-suite leaders would need to be knowledgeable about how these tools work and how they would be embedded into workflows.
After the executive training, Principal Financial—which sells insurance policies, retirement savings plans, and asset management services—rolled out the company’s first-ever AI literacy program this year. All employees are encouraged to take four different courses, which take under 10 hours to complete and cover the basics of AI: how to write prompts, and the importance of utilizing the right data to train large language models that can produce the appropriate responses.
In total, Principal Financial says, 82% of the company’s 20,000 employees have completed at least one course, while around 39% have finished all four. Principal Financial has also made AI training a component of new employee onboarding, and in 2026, intends to offer more comprehensive and specialized training for different job functions.
